In the December 2000 issue of Medical Humanities the following acknowledgements were inadvertently omitted: Barker P, Metaphors of life and death and Richardson R, A necessary inhumanity.

The original versions of the papers on which these articles are based were first presented at a conference, The Healing Arts: the Role of the Humanities in Medical Education, held at the Royal Society of Arts on 30th March 2000. The papers are reproduced in their original form, complete with illustrations, in D Kirklin and R Richardson, eds. Medical Humanities: an Introduction. London: Royal College of Physicians, 2001.